I build the creative work and the system that makes it.
Creative Technologist · Senior Technical Artist · West Orange, NJ
I'm Carlos Cruz. I sit on the seam between creative production and technical building - a designer who writes production code, and an engineer who cares how the frame actually looks. For a decade I've turned creative briefs into real-time visual systems, generative tooling, and the pipelines that let a team run them without me in the room.
A brief becomes a tool a team actually uses.
Every project on this site follows the same spine: a brief, built in the right tool for the craft - Houdini, Blender, raw C++ - and co-authored with Claude Code. The output is never a one-off asset. It's the workflow that produces many correct ones, handed off so the people who need it can drive it themselves.
Brief to working workflow
I take what someone sketched on a whiteboard and turn it into something that runs - not a deck, a thing the team opens on Monday.
Controls, not code
The hard engineering hides behind a few parameters, so a creative person drives a generative system without touching the machinery underneath.
Production-ready, not prototype-only
CI/CD, QA, and documentation come with the tool. I've shipped this way 20+ times at DNEG, where artists, editors, and compositors ran it in production.
So the team self-serves
The specialist composes the workflow once, documents it, then rotates off. The work outlasts my involvement - that's the point.
I understand how briefs become shippable assets.
My industrial-design training means I speak the creative side fluently - how a brief becomes a master file, how brand and fit rules constrain it, how it fans out into the variants a channel actually needs. My consulting work on an AI-driven tech-pack pipeline reads what a designer already makes - sketches, 3D renders, written notes - auto-populates the manufacturing spec, applies the brand's own material and fit rules, and validates the result before it reaches a sample line.
At DNEG I lived the other end of it: production-grade VFX and motion pipelines where on-brand output had to scale across artists without a specialist driving the tool each time. The supply chain - brief, master, variants, handoff, review - is the part I find most interesting, because it's where good creative work either ships or dies.
I direct AI, and I know when its output is wrong.
I use Claude Code daily as a build interface - composing workflows, authoring shaders, wiring integrations. The leverage is real, but the judgment is the job: every shader and pipeline decision gets checked against the rendered frame, not taken on trust. I describe the mechanism behind a result, not a speedup number, and I keep shipped capabilities clearly separate from what's still planned.
I ramp on a new API surface in days, not months - I've driven Houdini live over an MCP server, stood up REST APIs feeding real-time visualization, and integrated systems across very different stacks. The specific tools change; reading an unfamiliar surface quickly and knowing where it'll break does not.
Ten years straddling creative and technical.
What I reach for.
Shader authoring (HLSL / GLSL)
Custom render & post passes
C++ / OpenGL · GPU profiling
Blender
Parameter-driven systems
USD · FBX · glTF interchange
MCP servers as a build bridge
Generative AI in production
Mechanism over metrics
REST API design & integration
Git · CI/CD (Actions / Jenkins)
QA tooling & documentation
The dual track isn't a pivot. Shipping the creative work and the system that produces it - on the same project - is the whole point.